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Age-19

24, Howard Road, Stoke Newington

Third Battle of Ypres

This was a campaign fought between July and November 1917 and is often referred to as the Battle of Passchendaele, a village to the north-east of Ypres which was finally captured in November. It was an attempt by the British to break out of the Ypres salient and capture the higher ground to the south and the east, from which the enemy had been able to dominate the salient. It began well but two important factors weighed against them. First was the weather. The summer of 1917 turned out to be one of the wettest on record and soon the battlefield was reduced to a morass of mud which made progress very difficult, if not impossible in places. The second was the defensive arrangements of concrete blockhouses and machine gun posts providing inter-locking fire that the Germans had constructed and which were extremely difficult and costly to counter. For four months this epic struggle continued by the end of which the salient had been greatly expanded in size but the vital break out had not been achieved.

At 4.45am on 22nd August, 1917, as part of a general attack by Fifth Army and close on the heels of the Battle of Langemarck, 143 and 144 Brigades of 48th Division attacked from their positions near St Julien with their objective being the St Julien-Poelcapelle road  The 5th Warwickshire battalion of  143 Brigade attacked two strong points, ‘Springfield’ and ‘Winnipeg’ and C Company captured the gun pits which were then recaptured and finally captured again. At the same time the leading wave reached the first objective but the non-arrival of the tanks meant that they were unable to press on to their final objective and a strong counter attack by the enemy eventually drove them back to their starting positions. One of the battalion’s casualties on this day was Henry Reeve.